This article is part of a series: Bennett Institute teams

The OpenSAFELY Product Team’s mission is to understand our users’ needs, identify opportunities to improve OpenSAFELY products, and work with the tech teams to figure out the best solutions to build.

Who are we?

Catherine Stables is Lead Product Manager. In her previous role she was Data Product Manager for DataLoch, based at the University of Edinburgh. She has a background in academic research on cardiovascular disease, and a PhD from King’s College London.

What do we do?

We manage a work “pipeline” that feeds work to the tech teams. This involves taking ideas from users and other teams, and shaping them into potential packages of work that are aimed at achieving specific outcomes (we call these “initiatives”). We work with the OpenSAFELY operations team to determine the priority of each initiative and how it fits into our overall strategy. Once an initiative has been prioritised, we work with our fantastic tech teams to fully understand the problem and come up with solutions.

We try to talk to our users as often as possible to understand their problems and priorities, and use this understanding to keep the user at the centre of the technical development work. Aligned with the OpenSAFELY principles, we also keep the protection and respect of patients’ data at the heart of everything we do.

How do we work?

Because we’re a relatively new team we’re still learning, and are iterating on the methods and techniques that we use - and we love a good retro! We think Teresa Torres’ approach to Continuous Discovery is brilliant, and have recently been learning some new approaches to user testing. We plan to keep trying out new approaches to Product Management and learning as we go - and hopefully blog about what we learn along the way.

How to contact us?

We are always keen to find new collaborators, so please do get in touch at bennett@phc.ox.ac.uk if you would like to work with us!